>I bet I'd be hard pressed to find one person who genuinely reads Wikipedia as a hobby outside of the lone HNer who will claim "but I do."

Sounding off: I was 12 years old, with a dialup connection and a barely functional windows 98 computer, in a shithole town with no future. I got lost reading into the history of video game consoles, and from there, the history of computing and processors in general. I wouldn't have gotten into computers (and therefore, software development and an actual escape from the shithole town) without my limited access to Wikipedia.

What you're missing is that I wasn't looking for entertainment, I was looking for knowledge. Plenty of people seek it out for it's own merits, and I would love if people in other shitholes were able to be introduced to their hobby or passion.

In fact, before wikipedia, we had an actual, 1970s vintage cheapo encyclopedia set, and I read those multiple times. After that, we had Encarta 2000 on CD-ROM. Thank goodness too, because I probably would have moved on to our dictionary from that point